FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2010 file photo, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, thanks supporter Dona Green for volunteering to work at a phone bank at Fiorina's campaign headquarters in Sacramento, ... more

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, AP

Fiorina travels well-trod road against Boxer

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Carly Fiorina has been an A student all her life: as a self-confessed parent-pleasing little girl, as a philosophy major at Stanford University, as an MBA candidate at the University of Maryland, as a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This year, she has studied how to defeat Sen. Barbara Boxer, the 18-year Democratic incumbent senator from California.

Fiorina, 56, of Los Altos Hills plays to win or doesn't play at all, telling an interviewer early on, "I don't tilt at windmills."

But she has perplexed the state's political observers by sticking with the anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-offshore drilling stands that helped her win the GOP nomination, but that experts said could send her in the general election to the heap of would-be Boxer slayers who have trod this path before.

Boxer, 69, raises those stands at every opportunity. Fiorina hammers on California's 12.4 percent unemployment rate, which offers Republicans the best chance they've had in decades of knocking off the state's trophy liberal who built her career on social issues.

Fiorina describes Boxer as an out-of-touch politician who only knows out to create government jobs and doesn't understand how the real economy works.

But unlike another female former mogul, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has not recast her views to mirror those of more liberal California voters.

"One might say that's naivete, or maybe it's her genuine sense of integrity," said UC Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain. "I don't know her well enough to know. But for whatever reason, she's taken a more principled route, at least with respect to the Republican base, and that is the route that previous opponents of Barbara Boxer have taken, and it's never worked before."

Recent polls have shown Boxer opening up a lead in what was a toss-up, but the race remains very close.

Natural charisma

"Maybe political analysts are perplexed," Fiorina responded in an interview. "I'm not a professional politician. I haven't run for public office before. I think what people want to hear is who I am, what I believe, and how I would analyze the problem. So that's what I tell them."

Despite a lack of experience - and a record of voting in about 1 in 4 elections - Fiorina has won admiration as a campaigner. She has taken on the race despite a bout with breast cancer and the death of her stepdaughter at age 35 last year, which she and her husband, Frank, do not discuss.

Showing a natural charisma that fueled her rise from a receptionist at the D&J Hair Salon in Menlo Park to the first female chief of a Fortune 20 company, Fiorina can excite a crowd, mesmerize a room and charm the individual voters she has met campaigning up and down the state.

"She can captivate a room like few can," said Carl Guardino, head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a trade association.

He recalled Fiorina's speech in February to a "Women and Girls Leadership Summit" in San Jose where she enthralled "200 tech women and 250 very poor sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade girls simultaneously," a feat he called "amazing."

Fiorina has held her own against Boxer in their two debates, and as a writer, her autobiography is a best-seller.

Burdened by mistakes

But Fiorina is dogged by considerable baggage, starting with her controversial tenure at Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, when she was fired after a poisonous, public proxy fight with the company's heirs and key board members over a merger with Compaq Computer.

During the ensuing consolidation, she laid off 30,000 workers and outsourced jobs, sowing a bitterness still reflected in websites dedicated to venomous criticisms of her leadership.

She has also shown a propensity for gaffes that has tarnished her former reputation as a corporate wunderkind.

Asked about outsourcing during a visit to Washington in 2004, she infamously told The Chronicle, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore."

She exited her role as star adviser for GOP presidential nominee John McCain in 2008 after she said McCain was not qualified to run a major corporation, a bungled attempt to recover from her earlier observation that his vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, was unqualified.

She blundered this year into an off-microphone moment criticizing Boxer's hair as "so yesterday," erasing her own herculean efforts to soften her image.

A 'problem solver'

Fiorina, who said she developed a taste for politics in the McCain campaign, is trying to convince voters she's likable by meeting as many of them as she can face to face. That's a tall task in a state with 17 million registered voters, but it nonetheless tracks with the sometimes unconventional methods that have propelled her career.

"That's why I do four and five campaign events a day," Fiorina said. "It's why we take advantage of every opportunity to interact with people. ... I think that's actually really important. I'm a problem solver, that's what I've done all my life, and the way you solve problems is to find common ground with people - many people with whom you don't agree 100 percent of the time."

Fiorina's campaign rests on her record at Hewlett-Packard. Asked to name her proudest accomplishment and her deepest regret, Fiorina said, "My proudest accomplishment is the transformation of HP. My biggest regret is - this is sort of a non sequitur, but it's an honest answer - is that I didn't make it home in time to hear my mother's voice before she died."

Her HP reign still stirs passions and has become the subject of countless business-school case studies. Her detractors contend she conducted a "reign of terror" that transformed a Silicon Valley legend into a blasé corporate giant. Her fans insist she rescued a company trapped in a time warp from certain death.

Assessing HP record

As time has passed, and HP's post-merger success has become obvious, Fiorina's reputation is undergoing reassessment. Management guru and self-described Democrat Tom Peters mounted an unsolicited defense of Fiorina, saying "anyone who disses or discounts or dismisses the profound positive impact of her tenure at HP is blind or an idiot or both."

"Her job in coming to HP was to transform a huge bureaucratic-laden behemoth," Baack said. "A key success that most experts would agree on, looking back, is that she was able to provide that key catalyst that enabled the company to change."

But "it doesn't appear she was able to effectively convince others that she had the right vision or was the best candidate to lead HP," Baack said. "When you're the CEO, your No. 1 job is to get people to follow you, and that didn't happen."

Much of it came down to a culture clash, Baack said.

Water for farmers

If Fiorina does reach the U.S. Senate, it would be the first time Californians will have elected a Republican senator since Pete Wilson in 1988. She insists she is not a doctrinaire Republican, despite hewing to the party line on most issues.

"I'm not an apologist for the Republican Party," Fiorina said, citing her disagreement with her party's earlier opposition to a bill to extend unemployment benefits.

She goes out of her way to align herself publicly with Dianne Feinstein, California's popular, more centrist Democratic senator, despite Feinstein's efforts to distance herself from Fiorina.

Fiorina said the first thing she would do upon reaching Washington, "is sit down with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and get the water turned back on (to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley). The water situation is dire, it is costing people jobs, it is adding to our uncertainty. Sen. Feinstein and I could get that fixed in short order."

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